Chicago-based Cityzenith is on a mission to help polluted urban centres become carbon neutral by donating the company’s SmartWorld Pro2 digital twin platform to key cities, one at a time.

The global Clean Cities – Clean Future campaign was launched by the company’s CEO Michael Jansen.

“Since our inception we have been using these tools to deliver custom climate resilience applications to greenfield cities, real estate developments and infrastructure projects,” said Jansen. “We know the issues and now have the right data aggregation, analysis and visualisation capabilities to help solve them for cities, and those who design, build and manage them.

Cities produce more than 70% of the earth’s greenhouse gases and the world’s top 100 most-polluting cities produce 18% of global urban emissions, but Jansen said use of data and AI could change this dramatically.

“We will meet this challenge head-on, by going right to the biggest contributors first,” he said. “As one megacity reaps the benefits, so others and governments will follow their example. What works for one will work for all. That is the beauty of SmartWorld Pro2.”

He said launching the initiative marked a milestone for the company and shareable, networked, city-scale digital twin deployments. Digital twins were first developed to aggregate, analyse and visualise vastly complex information in manufacturing plants and building construction sites, but have evolved into a powerful aid to urban climate resilience and lowering carbon emissions.

“We’ve spoken publicly since 2013 about digital twin technology’s potential to accelerate energy transition and it’s now a reality,” said Jansen.

Early Cityzenith-led carbon emission reduction projects included efforts in San Francisco, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Chicago. These culminated in a World Smart City Award recognition, plus a World Cities Summit Young Leader appointment and letter of support from the C40 Cities Climate Action Group to explore collaborations jointly.

The focus has expanded to include large-scale commercial projects in cities as in the Orlando sports and entertainment district and greenfield smart cities such as Amaravati in India.

“In Amaravati, by consolidating myriads of climate related data points, the goal was to show how architects could use advanced AI integrations in SmartWorld Pro to simulate and design housing schemes to lower carbon emissions and cut average street temperatures dramatically in high summer,” he said. “Today we are helping partners all over the world leverage digital twin power across their district, infrastructure, campus and real-estate projects to transition from fossil fuel dependency to carbon neutrality.”

But he said nobody seemed to be helping cities to implement this technology.

“That’s why we decided to step in and make our pledge,” he said. “We’ve asked people all over the world to join our mission. Where the world’s governments have backed off or just don’t know what to do, we the people need to lead the way.”

Cityzenith is based in Chicago with offices in London and New Delhi. The company’s SmartWorld Pro2 digital twin platform was created for anyone designing, constructing and managing complex, large-scale building projects, properties and real-estate portfolios.